Gil Spencer: Ed Rendell says government has gone soft

Check that! He thinks the political leaders who run this country are “wusses” because they won’t raise taxes on you high enough to pay for all the new infrastructure we need to keep America great.

Or something like that.

At least, that’s what he suggested to an audience at Radnor Middle School the other day in a reprise of his ridiculously titled 2010 political memoir: “A Nation of Wusses.”

“It is not the people of this country that are the wusses,” he said. “It is the legislators and people in government that have become the wusses. That is why when discussing my book you have to add the subtitle with it — ‘How America’s Leaders Lost the Guts to Make Us Great.’”

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Geez, who knew that was their job?

And who knew it would be as easy as throwing a few hundred billion dollars at our supposedly crumbling bridges, levees and highways to reclaim our greatness?

Here I thought it was the job of our elected officials to make sure that the sort of public services deemed reasonable and necessary by voters — like policing, the justice system and clearing the roads after a snow storm — were delivered to people in the most cost-effective way possible. Not that they come anywhere close at succeeding at this rather mundane job. But I thought that was the job. Silly me.

Their’s is the job of making America great and suddenly they are failing at it.

Ed Rendell, of course, doesn’t include himself as part of the new political class of gutless leaders. During his time as mayor of Philadelphia, he tells us in his memoir, he took on the city unions, got them to agree to more reasonable work rules and less-generous raises than they were used to. After restoring greatness to the city and leaving it in the capable hands of fellow Democrat John Street, he moved to Harrisburg.

Greatness followed. Or should have. But somehow, Pennsylvania’s bridges, highways and other “infrastructure” continued to deteriorate, right along with the rest of the country’s. Oh well, there is a limit to what any one man — no matter how courageous — can accomplish.

Still, as he told the folks in Radnor, it’s too bad we Americans are not the same people we used to be.

We used to take risks, he said, and he mentioned the building of the Erie Canal. We used to build highways, and he mentioned Dwight D. Eisenhower spending the money to build the interstate highway system.

Funny though, when it comes to thinking about America’s past greatness, mentioning it in the same breath with the name Eisenhower, I immediately think of World War II. The interstate highway system is nice, but what good would it be if the Thousand Year Reich was in its second century of world domination?

But it was in the context of lauding the big domestic spending plans of our past that Rendell dared to say the bravest of brave things:

“Our government should not be afraid to spend money.”

Whether at that moment the crowd of 100 at RMS leapt to its feet and gave our former guv a standing ovation, I have no idea. But God would have blessed the seventh-grader who had the nerve to ask Mr. Rendell, “Doesn’t our current government already spend a heckuva lot of dough?”

After all, America doesn’t have a $16 trillion debt because our political leaders are “afraid” to blow through cash?

We have a $16 trillion debt because our elected officials like to spend money like there’s no tomorrow. What these same officials don’t like to do is ask voters to pay for all that spending.

Oh, they’ll ask the top 2 percent of the richest voters to pay more in taxes, but they won’t ask the great middle class to shell out for all these things they tell us we need and deserve.

How brave is that?

“There is no greater example of the wussification of America,” Rendell says, “than the growing neglect of our nation’s infrastructure.”

Really, Ed? We’re a bunch of wusses because a few bridges need repair and some potholes haven’t been filled?

Rendell said, “Talk to a young man today and he’ll marvel at the way his father’s and grandfathers’ generation knew how to make and fix things. That doesn’t just mean oil changes and water heaters; that goes for bridges and roads, too.”

But that’s ridiculous. There are still plenty of young and old men who know how to build bridges and fix roads. Whether we do it or not has nothing to do with being a bunch of wusses. It all comes down to priorities.

And when you have a president who is more interested in promoting universal pre-K and protecting the entitlements of retired people, sometimes bridge repair will take a back seat.

When you have other elected officials who reward the members of public employee unions with lavish pensions and health care benefits to the point where cities and towns are actually going bankrupt paying them, the building of a new highway overpass often plays second fiddle.

But when it comes to taking money from the next generation to pay for entitlement benefits of today’s senior citizens and retirees, no one has been braver than Ed Rendell and his fellow public servants.

Their names may go down in history as profligates and irresponsible spenders of other people’s money. But they are brave enough to weather that possibility in the future because they aren’t brave enough to stand up to the voters of today and tell them they’re ain’t no such thing as a free off-ramp.

A wuss is a wimp. But “A Nation of Wimps” was already taken as a title when Ed Rendell started writing his book in 2009. So he had to settle for his own clumsy alliteration.

If America is becoming a nation of wimps, it’s because of an overweening and dependence-creating government of the sort Democrat Ed Rendell has championed his entire life.

He vows that he will never again run for public office. Apparently, he’s lost the ambition and guts to make the rest of us “great.”

Thank heaven for small favors.

Gil Spencer is a columnist for our sister newspaper The Delaware County Daily Times in Primos. Check out his spencerblog every day at delcotimes.com.